August 31, 2016

Netoge -- plundered

Ako is really creepy, you know that? In the third episode she actually goes
yandere briefly. Her mother is, if anything, even more creepy. "My daughter
is up in her bedroom. Here's the key to her door!"

Well, anyway, 191 candidates out of 10 episodes. I'm not going to bother with
the first two because the President and the Flat-chested Blonde are using male
avatars in the game. (I think that changes in the middle of ep 2 somewhere, but
I don't feel like doing anything more.)

August 29, 2016

It occurred to me that Netoge was probably a prime source of fan
service. I only watched an episode or two and wasn't interested in the
slightest, but it should be good fodder for the top rotation.

So I downloaded the 1080p Horriblesubs version and found out it was
hardsubbed, making it useless to me. Deleted that and downloaded all the AT-X
raws from Ohys and started going through them.

As usual when I'm plundering a show I don't want to become interested in, I'm
doing it backwards. I've done episodes 12-10 so far and I have 57 candidates, so
it should be pretty good.

I had thought that Ako was going to be the primary fan service object, given
her position in the story and her character design (ahem).

But it turned out to be this chick:

She's the student body president and the leader of the RPG team that is the
center of this story. And the reason she leads in fan service is that her
character in the game runs around topless. (And she has a lot of top to uncover!)

Those two straps flop free, except that they seem to be glued to her nipples.
Aside from that, there isn't anything that prevents free movement (ahem).

All the other members of the team (except for Our Hero) are cute girls, so
there's plenty of fodder. Only problem is that too many of the shots are ruined
by having Our Hero in them, so I'm kind of bending the "No guys" rule
a bit. (It's my site; I make the rules; and I can change them. So there.)

I'm kind of burned out right now so I'll pick it up in the morning and see
how far I can get.

1
The basic conceit is that two of the three girls play guy characters, including No Shirt Prez, so when you see them looking like the girls, it's the guy's mental translation of the person onto the character. And an excuse to draw her in non-suspenders, yeah.

Starting at the end means you have a semi-serious story arc or two to get through. Don't worry, Ako has plenty of good fan service (not so much Schwein...)

August 08, 2016

Top rotation update

I've been putting off a top-rotation update partly because I just didn't have enough stuff to add. This afternoon I realized I never plundered the Girls und Panzer movie, so I went through it (and through the Movie OVA) and ended up with 170 candidates. I already collected about 170 from Haifuri so that's a reasonable amount.

Tomorrow I'm going to process them all and come up with a new version of Chooser.

July 18, 2016

Bleak, bleak I tell you

I don't remember a season where I had nothing to watch at all. Even if
there wasn't anything else that excited me, I could watch something like Fairy
Tail to get me through. But Fairy Tail is on another hiatus, waiting for the
manga to get adequately ahead. Dragonball Super is still running, but it has
jumped the shark. (Actually, it's been jumping the shark ever since it began,
but initially they were OK sharks. But Dark Goku? From the future? Please...)

Ange Vierge looked like it might be OK. AT-X may be running it but AT-X raws
haven't been showing up, and I suspect the reason is that they're running the
same version as all the terrestrial stations, loaded with fog and obscuring
light beams. So no one is posting AT-X raws because there isn't any point. And it'll be months before we see the BDs.

That's a disappointment, but another reason is that the show concept is
idiotic. Generally, shows based on games don't tend to go well, especially if
they're extended advertisements for the game. But even when not: Hikaru no Go
bored me, and the only reason to watch Saki was the fan service. (I could
care less about Mahjongg.)

It is theoretically possible for a game-based-show to transcend the game and
be worthwhile in its own right, but right off the top I can't think of any. A
lot of successes out that, if you measure success by how many episodes are
involved, but I think it takes more than that. It takes, you know, a good story
and good characters and things like that.

Ange Vierge doesn't seem to be measuring up. I downloaded the second episode
but all I did was skip through it. I'll give them points for actually trying to
tell a story and to have distinctive characters, but it doesn't seem to be very
well done.

So what in hell am I going to blog about this summer? I'm getting tired of
going through Gelbooru for cheesecake posts; they long since became repetitive
and redundant, and I'm running out of reasonable keywords. (I got a long list of unreasonable keywords, however.) The idea of starting to post about
politics again really doesn't feel like anything I want. Every time I even
mention politics, just in passing, to be funny, the Earnest and Committed come out of the
wood work and infest my comments.

I have occasionally made genuine political posts, and I always turn off
comments for them because I know what would happen. (I really don't want to
repeat my experience with USS Clueless.)

Ah! Alternative Energy! Just the thing! (Moan, whimper...)

About the only things that come to mind are the occasional posts where I
think of something strange, like magical girls, or going back and watching and
posting about old shows I skipped the first time, except that I skipped them for
a reason and the reason still applies.

I suppose I can come up with something, but it probably won't be every day.
I've been trying really hard to post something every day, but I doubt I
can keep doing so.

2
The first episode of Alderamin has me really interested. And, I'm working up the courage to make it through the next arc of Re:Zero (absolutely NOT recommended for anyone unless you ENJOY MC pain and suffering).

Other than that... I got nothin'.

Posted by: BigD at July 18, 2016 10:36 PM (VKO9N)

3
I probably should mention that I'm already quite interested in Love Live Sunshine, Planetarian, and Saiki. I already found the "flash animations" of Saiki from 3 years ago and loading the heck on spoilers for it. Those are a riot of hilarity and the voice acting is great (animation is, of course, "flash").

4
Not exactly your cup of tea, but I really enjoy the anime adaptation of Amaama to Inazuma (Sweetness and Lightning), which is a slice of life show with a widowed father raising his 5 year old daughter with a dash of cooking throw in.

Posted by: BigFire at July 19, 2016 08:39 AM (O7l6D)

5
The S&L started nice, but I loaded on manga spoilers enough to know that it's unfinished. In addition, the art on the father is quite irritating. Feels like they focused so much on the runt that they burned out by the time they had to draw and animate the father.

6
The fact that Sweetness & Lightning is based on an on-going manga really doesn't diminish its appeal. It's a slice of life show, life goes on even after the show ends.

Posted by: BigFire at July 19, 2016 12:21 PM (O7l6D)

7
I'm surprised as many shows this season are appealing to me as much as they are. Alderamin has a promising main character; Taboo Tattoo has decent action; I enjoy Sweetness & Lightning well enough for its cuteness; Planetarian is only 5 short episodes but it's set in an interesting universe; 91 Days is fun for its focus on bootlegging and revenge; Re:Zero has wild mood swings but is engrossing; Orange is a tear jerker but it has a little time travel element that makes for some interest; Mob 100 has the same sense of humor as One Punch Man; and of course I'm watching Berserk since I liked the prequel movies and excessive violence.
Not a big fan of Time Travel Shoujo; it's basically His Boy Sherman without Mr. Peabody.
Rewrite still hasn't struck a chord with me, but I may keep watching.
Amanchu! is a healing anime with a very annoying main character.
So I've got enough going this season to enjoy it.

June 29, 2016

More Win 10 grief

Until now I've been using IE to do most of my posting around here, but it
looks as if I'm going to have to use Firefox from now on.

I compose my articles using a dusty copy of Frontpage (from 2001, which
Microsoft doesn't sell or support any more) and cut-and-pasting into the
"new page" area using IE. But that doesn't work any more. The paste does
nothing.

And I can compose directly in the IE windows (though that's risky) but I
can't enter any links. The "add link" tool no longer works in IE under
Win 10. It works in Firefox, though, so I guess that's where I go now.

I tried "Edge" because I was curious but it only took me a couple
of minutes to decide I didn't want any part of it. Being able to add notations
to web pages is an interesting idea but that's not enough to make me put up with
all the things I didn't like.

It isn't a new idea, anyway. I used to have a program I bought that allowed
me to do that for myself, and it was handy. It was also private; my notations
didn't get shared. I no longer remember the name of the thing, and in any case the real problem with
it is that it didn't scale well. As my total number of notes climbed,
performance went into the toilet when I tried to load a page.

There was also something I vaguely remember about that same time that
involved notes that were shared. If you accessed someone's site directly,
that's all you got. But if you went to it through a proxy server (IIRC) then you
saw the original page and you saw all the garbage that every other user
left. It didn't last long, probably for the same reason a lot of other bright
ideas of the time didn't last: no revenue. (This was during the Dot-Com era when
the motto was "We'll figure out how to make money off it after the IPO.")

Nowadays there would be other reasons for it to fail: spam, hate comments,
and so on.

Regardless, Microsoft has now revived the idea with Edge, and I assume they
are going to have a huge spam problem with it, even if no other issues arise.

The Microsoft store also doesn't impress. Nearly all the games are Free* which means you can download and run them without paying but
in-game there will be plenty of opportunities for you to shell out hard cash for
in-game advantages. Screw that.

Microsoft Solitaire is installed on here but it doesn't run. It's in the
store, too, but the store tells me I already have it. Maybe I'll try deleting it
and reinstalling it. Or maybe I don't care.

Next on the list is to go find my installations of Master of Orion and Master
of Magic and get shortcuts to them onto my desktop.

It would also be nice if I could figure out a way to disable the damned
touchpad, but so far I haven't been able to figure one out. The best way would
be to uninstall the device but the first place I looked to do that wouldn't let
me. (The button is there but it's grayed out.)

Any transition this drastic is going to have hiccups. (Ooooh, hiccups. That's
what caused my stroke.) These hiccups are nowhere near that deadly, at least so
far.

On another subject, I added Bakuon! to the top rotation but it seems to me
like I really should do something else, too. Netoge would probably be a
good series to plunder but, sorry, I just can't work up any enthusiasm for it. I
think Haifuri might be pretty good, as long as you all don't mind the
fact that it isn't really a fanservice show. And I probably won't plunder the
whole thing because I don't want to watch the whole thing.

1
I did use Edge when I first started with Win10 machines, but after two days, I just pinned IE to the task bar and right click on certain files to use something other than Edge to open them. There were no show-stopping problems, but the small annoyances quickly added up to exceed how much I was willing to experience with Edge.

I did the exact same thing. Edge rearranged all my Favorites, and it didn't keep the favorites list in the same place when I brought the pane back up (it went back to the top of the list every time). That was absolutely irritating when I'm reading through a list of links.

I'm going to ride IE until it drops, then probably go to Firefox.

Posted by: CatCube at June 29, 2016 07:31 PM (fa4fh)

3
If you're fond of cute girls in black sweaters with fabulous reaction faces, Servant x Service could be a veritable gold mine of topshots.

4
Edge, as released, isn't really ready for prime time. The November Update made it a lot better, and based on insider previews, it continues to improve (it even has extensions now!) but of course most people won't see that until August.
As far as the annotation stuff, I haven't even looked at it but I would've assumed it's all stored locally, or possibly in (ominous sting) The Cloud, if you logged in with a Microsoft account instead of a local one.
I saw a couple of results from Google searching yesterday that said a few people had found a fix for the store not opening--but your discovery of the proxy thing is probably the real problem in your case (unless you're lucky and both things apply).

8
Hah, I didn't even know you COULD turn the spell-checker off. (I don't often write non-English words, so it's actually useful to me as a typo-spotter.)

Posted by: RickC at June 30, 2016 02:42 PM (FvJAK)

9
> The best way would be to uninstall the device but the first place I looked to do that wouldn't let me.
Don't forget by default, you're not running as an administrator, so you wouldn't have permissions to do it.

11
Going to the device manager, finding the touchpad on the tree, double-clicking to open "Properties" and clicking the "Disable" button on the Driver tab doesn't work? That's been an option since at least XP.

The "uninstall" button isn't, though. But when I uninstall it, Win10 kindly and helpfully reinstalls it.

The right solution is supposed to be to install the ASUS "Smart Gesture" package, which includes in it a check box that says "Disable the touch pad when a mouse is connected". But the Smart Gesture package won't install. Probably some day ASUS will bring out a new version of it which might fix the issue, but they haven't so far.

So 5 episodes done and 144 candidates so far. I've been noticing that a lot of scenes in this show, taken out of context, are extremely confusing. Like that one; if you have seen the show you'll know why a crane is lifting a Ducati with a side car.

Now that I understand what's going on with Lime,
I'm seeing a lot of hints about her in the earlier episodes that I just breezed by the first time. I'm grabbing evidence as it appears for my theory about her and I'll make a post about it once I've finished the plundering pass.

June 01, 2016

UPDATE: Oh, and while I'm bitching and moaning, a request to my fellow bloggers: Could you please put your YouTube's below the fold? When a page has 10 or 15 youtubes on the front page, it locks up IE solid for about ten seconds, or twenty, or even more while all of them load. You can't click anything; you can't even kill it.

It's probably important to put the BBCode tags method in to the main post. The method you posted doesn't work for me. I get the link window up, but none of the buttons do anything, including the button to dismiss the window.

I think some of the comments discuss how to get around that by hard coding, but it's something you have to hunt for.

Posted by: CatCube at June 02, 2016 05:04 AM (fa4fh)

4
I have a similar problem with gifs. A forum I frequent recently added gif support. This, in itself, is not a bad thing, most of the gifs posted are relevant and amusing.

The problem is when there are 20+ of them on a single page. Then the browser crashes to a halt for a while when the page loads. And its very easy to end up with that many, since almost no one edits the gifs out of their quotes.

Posted by: metaphysician at June 03, 2016 06:09 AM (wPtAD)

5
The most annoying thing on the Internet is a site that uses dynamically-generated infinite scrolling and posts a lot of animated GIF videos (also known as "2/3 of Tumblr"). No browser can survive long, and when it eventually is forced to reload the page or crash, there's no way to get back to what in a sane universe would have been "page 37".

Speaking of which, has anyone else noticed that Tumblr is having trouble reliably serving up the images they host? It's gotten to the point that at certain times of day, cheesecake Tumblrs sometimes load only about a third of their pictures for me.